The Hindu : New Delhi News : `Massive shortage' of engineers hitting MCD work

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Apr 19, 2006

New Delhi

New Delhi

`Massive shortage' of engineers hitting MCD work

Staff Reporter

`Main reason affecting the monitoring of construction work in the Capital'

NEW DELHI: Senior Municipal Corporation of Delhi officials might have initiated severe penal action against defaulting engineers who allowed unauthorised constructions and illegal shops to come up in their areas, but the Forum of MCD Engineers has cited a massive shortage of engineers in the civic body as the main reason affecting the monitoring of construction work in the Capital.

Quoting an internal report prepared last year, the Forum has claimed that as per the Central Public Works Department norms, there should be 5,520 junior engineers (JE) in the MCD, but only 485 engineers have been appointed. Similarly there is also a shortage of engineers for other senior posts also.

Committee

Last year the MCD had formed a committee to "consider technical cadre review of different technical posts on the analogy of the CPWD" which found that the proposed workable strength of JEs in the civic body should be 3,040, but only 485 JEs were working against the sanctioned strength of 774.

Similarly, in the case of assistant engineers (AEs), the CPWD norms say there should be 1,380 of them, while the least workable limit should be 1,022. But only 323 AEs were working. In the case of executive engineers (EEs), against the CPWD norms and workable limit of 345 only 93 EEs were working in the civic body, while against the prescribed norms of 86 superintending engineers (SEs), the MCD was having just 26 SEs. Similarly, in case of chief engineers (CEs), there should be 21 officers as per the CPWD norms, but only seven CEs were working in the civic body at the time of submission of the report.

"So in the case of JEs the shortage is of 4,746 officers, 1,057 in case of AEs, 60 in SEs and 14 in CEs," says Forum general secretary A.P. Khan, adding that the report was pending with the Municipal Commissioner for the past six months but no remedial measures have been initiated so far. Under such circumstances, how can engineers be blamed for all the civic mess?''

Stating that in the case of the Building Department alone, against the requirement of 500 engineers, only 80 have been appointed, Forum spokesperson Arun Kumar alleged that the MCD bureaucracy was responsible for it. "Such massive shortage of engineers will affect proper functioning of any organisation," he added.

Commercial

Meanwhile, the MCD squads on Tuesday sealed 274 illegal shops operating from residential areas in the Capital, while 139 shops were de-sealed. The maximum number of shops were sealed in the Civil Lines zone (53) followed by Sadar Paharganj (48), Shahdara-South (45), Rohini (33) and Central (29). So far the civic body has sealed 4,764 shops while 847 commercial establishments have been de-sealed.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

New Delhi

News Update

Stories in this Section